A month after its $1 billion acquisition by E.l.f. Beauty, Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode is heading to Sephora. Beginning September 4, the 3-year-old brand will be carried by all of the retailer’s freestanding stores in the U.S. and Canada as well as on its website.
Rhode’s first permanent entry into brick-and-mortar comes on the heels of its explosive growth. The company doubled its consumer base over the past year, driving a total of $212 million in net sales in the 12 months that ended March 31.
Rhode has had particular success on TikTok Shop, where it’s sold more than 112,000 units of its hero products, including pocket blushes, lip tints, and a curated edit of skincare items designed to achieve what Bieber frequently describes as a “glazed donut” look (moisturized and ultra-glossy). Sales were helped, in part, by Bieber’s social presence. She has 55 million Instagram followers and more than 16 million followers on TikTok.
Ingredients for success
Though some newer celebrity brands have struggled in recent years, Rhode CEO Nick Vlahos credits his company’s success to its responsible approach to launching new products, growing sustainably and maintaining good margins before expanding. Rhode regularly sells out of limited-drop products, and presold its lip glosses to Bieber’s Instagram followers before they even launched.
Vlahos, who joined Rhode in February after leading the Honest Company, said that entering brick-and-mortar retail was always part of the plan, especially as Rhode eyes international expansion. The brand will enter Sephora UK later in the fall, and E.l.f’s international presence could help with further expansion and distribution globally.
Vlahos also highlights how Sephora’s digital prowess can help a digitally native brand like Rhode better market to customers in different areas. “Sephora really has the ability from a targeting perspective to better geotarget within their respective marketplace,” he says.
Priya Venkatesh, Sephora’s global chief merchandiser, says Rhode’s ingredient-focused approach to marketing could appeal to consumers who are looking to get into skincare but feel daunted by so many options. “Rhode is a great invitation into beauty for anyone who’s not feeling comfortable with the current complexity or who finds the category a bit intimidating,” she says.
Venkatesh notes that Sephora saw 2 million unique searches for Rhode on its own site before the partnership was announced. As a result, the company decided to launch Rhode in all freestanding stores immediately, rather than doing a slow rollout.
Sephora Shelf Life
Key to the partnership is translating Rhode’s minimalist aesthetic into physical stores. Rhode established its visual identity through striking and surprising ad campaigns that have gone viral on social media—from getting singer Tate McRae to model alongside life-size peptide-infused lip pencils to having Babygirl actor Harris Dickinson promote the brand’s new face mist. This past year, these viral campaigns led to a 367% rise in earned media.
Last year, Rhode brought its visual identity into pop-ups in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, and London. Fans of the brand lined up for hours to purchase products and re-create viral “strawberry girl” or “latte” makeup looks popularized by Bieber. Roughly a thousand customers lined up for the brand’s New York pop-up, and some queued for more than seven hours in the London rain for that event. The pop-ups included design elements from the brand’s packaging, like rounded corners, monochrome colors, and stark lighting.
In a move from Glossier’s Sephora playbook, Rhode designed custom shelving and displays—similar to the ones from its pop-ups—that will help the brand stand out in store.
“Customers can expect glossy grey buildouts with sleek, soft edges and mirror moments for content. It’s what our community knows and expects from Rhode, now brought to life in a retail environment,” Bieber said in an emailed statement.
Some of the shelves include a large mirror at the center of the products, encouraging customers to take selfies and create content for social media—a strategy guaranteed to deliver the brand even more viral, earned media.
